Introducing the First Round of WPBeginner Growth Accelerator Companies

In August, we decided to do something that had never been done before in the WordPress community. We created the WPBeginner Growth Accelerator, first-ever growth fund for WordPress-focused businesses. Today, I’m extremely excited to announce the first round of WPBeginner accelerator companies.

Aside from announcement, I will also be sharing behind the scenes details and process at the end of this article (so keep on reading).

1. CaseProof aka MemberPress and Pretty Links

CaseProof is the parent company behind MemberPress, Pretty Links, and Affiliate Royale.

If you have been reading WPBeginner for a while, then you probably know that we’ve been longtime fans of MemberPress. We believe it is the best WordPress membership plugin, and it is my preferred solution for creating a membership site in WordPress.

Caseproof also have two other affiliate marketing related products that I am really excited about because we can add a lot of value to it from our years of experience.

The first one is Pretty Links which is the most popular link tracking plugin in WordPress (used by over 200,000+ websites). You can use it for affiliate link management and turning your long affiliate links into easily trackable shortlinks.

The second is Affiliate Royale which helps you create a full-featured affiliate program using WordPress. This allows you to add a referral program to your membership sites created with MemberPress, and it also works with other popular eCommerce providers like WooCommerce, WishList Member, etc.

2. Formidable Forms

Formidable Forms is the most advanced WordPress form builder in the market. It helps you go beyond the basic contact form and build complex form-based solutions like directories, data management systems, calculators, quizzes, WooCommerce product forms, and more.

Now you might be thinking, wait doesn’t WPBeginner already have it’s own WordPress contact form plugin? Yes I still believe that WPForms is the most beginner-friendly WordPress contact form plugin in the market.

But you see, calling Formidable a contact form plugin doesn’t do it justice. It’s really way more advanced than that. It’s a true “solutions-focused” WordPress form builder. Let me give you a few examples to illustrate the point:

You can use Formidable Views feature to display any submitted form data on the front-end of your website to build data-driven web applications like real estate listings, employment listings, event calendars, business directories, job boards, and other searchable databases.

You can use Formidable calculated fields to quickly build calculator forms like mortgage calculator, car payment calculator, BMI calculator, etc.

You can use Formidable WooCommerce integration to create a product configurator form with cascading fields and then automatically send the data to WooCommerce art with variable pricing option.

Basically Formidable Forms is freelancers and developers dream come true for building complex WordPress sites with low overhead.

3. SeedProd

SeedProd is the most popular coming soon and maintenance mode plugin for WordPress. Currently it is being used by over 800,000 WordPress sites.

It comes with 50+ pre-made templates and 500,000+ free stock photos to help you quickly create a beautiful coming soon page or maintenance page for your website.

The pro version also comes with email marketing integrations as well as addons for creating a notification bar, countdown timers, custom login page, custom 404 page, and custom landing pages.

SeedProd is another product that we have recommended on WPBeginner since the early days.

Unlike the Caseproof and Formidable, we actually ended up doing a full acquisition of SeedProd given the high synergies between our brands and existing products. SeedProd is officially an Awesome Motive product, but they will also be part of the first WPBeginner accelerator class as well.

Please help me welcome the first 3 WPBeginner Accelerator companies by giving them social media love and trying out their products.

What Happens Next?

I have already met up with the founders of all 3 companies last month when they flew to West Palm Beach, FL.

We had detailed conversations and started working on implementing our checklist. Each of them have an amazing roadmap of new things that are in the works (which of course I can’t share just yet).

I’m really looking forward to sharing my experiences and helping these WordPress companies succeed by building more user-focused products.

WPBeginner Accelerator – Behind the Scenes Process

I honestly had no idea what to expect when I created the blog post to announce our accelerator fund. Nothing like this have been done before in our industry.

I looked at other accelerators for guidance and made our application process as simple as possible.

In total, we had over 90+ companies apply to be part of the WPBeginner accelerator. This was pretty awesome, but it also made the decision process really hard.

I got a chance to talk with amazing entrepreneurs who’re doing great things in the WordPress ecosystem, but ultimately we had to pick the top companies from the group.

Initially I wanted to select 5 companies to be part of our first round, but after having numerous conversations with entrepreneurs who applied, I decided to reduce the number down to 3 because I wanted to make sure that I can properly fulfill my commitments.

Considering some of the companies that we invested in have multiple products, it made sense to limit the first class of WPBeginner accelerator to 3 companies.

Final Thoughts

We will likely re-open the accelerator in 6 – 12 months depending on how smoothly the implementation goes with our first round of companies.

The number of applications in the first-round shows a lot of promise and definitely validates my idea that a WordPress-focused investment fund is needed.

Aside from an accelerator, there might be some opportunity for an incubator fund to provide seed investments for early stage product ideas / development.

That’s all for today. Thank you so much for your continued support of WPBeginner.

Yours Truly,
Syed Balkhi
Founder of WPBeginner

The post Introducing the First Round of WPBeginner Growth Accelerator Companies appeared first on WPBeginner.

Source: Wordpres

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FCC ready to ‘take action’ against carriers if spam robocalls aren’t stopped

Huffington Post

• Ajit Pai of the FCC sent out a strongly-worded letter to the major players of the U.S. telecom industry.
• In the letter, Pai says the FCC will “take action” if the carriers can’t create an industry-wide solution to the plague of spam robocalls hitting consumers.
• There are billions of spam robocalls made to consumers each month.

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In a press release dated yesterday, the Federal Communications Commission detailed the strongly-worded letter chairman Ajit Pai sent to the major players in the United States telecom industry. The letter revolves around the plague of spam robocalls we consumers have to deal with on a daily basis.

According to the press release, the letter contains demands for the major telecom companies — including Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T, and even Google — to come up with an industry-wide solution for our deluge of robocalls.

Here is a snippet from the letter:

“Carriers need to continue working together to make this happen and I am calling on those falling behind to catch up. I also thank the many providers that are well on their way toward implementation. Greater participation will ensure the system works for consumers, who expect real progress in combatting malicious spoofing and scam robocalls. If it does not appear that this system is on track to get up and running next year, then we will take action to make sure that it does.”

According to the press release, the letter does not detail what Pai could mean by “take action.” However, the letter does elucidate what the FCC expects carriers to do, which is to universally adopt the SHAKEN/STIR framework.

Editor’s Pick

FCC finally officially bans both ‘slamming’ and ‘cramming’ phone fraud

Wikimedia Commons

The Federal Communications Commission in the United States finally placed an official ban on the illegal practices of “cramming” and “slamming” telephone bills. The practices are already federal crimes but weren’t violations …

SHAKEN/STIR is essentially a token handoff between a caller, the carrier, and the recipient of the call which allows the carrier to validate the phone call is from the person it says it is. One of the real problems with robocalls is the spammers’ ability to spoof the consumer into thinking the call is coming from a local number. This makes the recipient of the call feel more comfortable answering.

According to NBC News, United States citizens received over 30 billion spam calls in 2017, which is an average of 2.5 billion spam calls every month. Clearly, that’s a problem, and it’s nice to know the FCC is at least going to attempt to do something about it.

You can read the entire FCC press release here.

NEXT: FCC disappointed with US carriers’ response to Hurricane Michael

Source: Android Zone

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Huawei rolling out Android Pie from Saturday: Here’s which phones will get it

• Huawei will roll out EMUI 9.0 based on Android Pie this weekend.
• The update will roll out to a total of nine Huawei and Honor smartphones.
• This would be a marked improvement on Huawei’s typical Android software rollout timelines.

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Huawei has announced it will roll out EMUI version 9.0, based on Android Pie, starting this weekend. Several China-focused publications picked up the news earlier today via a Huawei Weibo post.

The software will launch on nine Huawei and Honor smartphones but Huawei has yet to confirm where and how it will roll out. We’ve reached out to Huawei for confirmation on this and further details about the update process.

GizChina

Here is the list of phones set to receive the Android Pie update from November 10:

• Huawei P20
• Huawei P20 Pro
• Huawei Mate 10
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
• Huawei Mate 10 Porsche Design
• Huawei Mate RS Porsche Design
• Honor 10
• Honor View 10
• Honor Play

EMUI 9.0 is expected to deliver a new look, faster app loading speeds, and GPU Turbo 2.0 when it hits smartphones; find out more about what it will offer here.

The rollout would be a positive move for Huawei — an OEM that has traditionally been among the slower to roll out new software. It may go some way to help it maintain its number two global smartphone vendor position, and perhaps even soon topple Samsung (which also typically underperforms in software rollout timelines).

Correction: A previous version of this article said the update would roll out globally. This has yet to be confirmed and I’ve reached out to Huawei for further details. I regret the error. 

Source: Android Zone

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